MC4.1 Objects

Zusammenfassung

This subproject analysed and conceptualised the processual aspect of integrating an unfamiliar material object into new display or artistic practices by discarding, adding, or changing frames. Next to these material frames which visually and haptically inform the viewer of the work's meaning, frames of other guises were employed as well.

The discursive frame was used to demonstrate the mutual assessments of perspectival renderings in paintings of the early-modern period in China and Japan on the one hand and in Europe on the other. Another path of investigating the discursive frame was in the guise of colophons in Japanese handscrolls narrating in script and paintings devotional legends. Unpublished scrolls of the fifteenth century were transcribed and analysed for the first time. Unexpectedly, the colophons were hardly stereotype, as was often assumed, but expressed rather individual wishes and aims associated with the donation of the scrolls. Additionally, the colophons seem to have been a crucial ingredient in rendering the scrolls accessible to an audience unacquainted with its contents and convincing the readers of its powerful efficacy. Colophons here are not transcultural in the sense of a mediating medium in East-Asian exchanges with Europe or vice versa. But these pivotal texts serve, in a sense, to negotiate between the material (handscroll) and the audience, which the author of the colophon guides in her understanding of what she was to think of the material. Colophons have been interpreted as framing devices not only by Gèrard Genette in his famous concepts of the paratext or peritext, but they are the subject of study in our partner project MC4.3, “Paratexts in Late Imperial Chinese Book Culture”.

The spatial frame is another important concept, which informs the necessity to adapt unfamiliar artefacts and appropriate them into a spatial environment that the owner (or agent) has culturally adapted to. This phenomenon was researched and published by project members including the framing of art and material culture from Asia throughout semi-private spaces and museums in the Netherlands; the role of metal mounts as ‘frames’ in different kinds of Sino-European artefacts; the frameworks of early modern Kunstkammer display; and the transformation of painted and printed frames in Dutch world maps in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Japanese art and visual culture.

8 March, 2015『可変性をそなえた「フレーム」概念 --『万国人物図』受容の多様性』(Reflections on the Concept of the Frame: the multiple adaptations of the “Peoples of the World”)Conference: Frames and Framings in a Transdisciplinary Context, Gakushûin University, Tokyo

17 July, 2014 Imagining/Framing social and ethnic interactions in pictorial narratives of seventeenth-century Japan, Panel 5: Marginal Peoples in Early Modern and Modern Japan, Panel Organizer: Timon Screech, SOAS, London, First Conference of the Association of Asian Studies in Asia, Singapore

„Materialität, Mäzenatentum und Objektbiografien: Kanonisierungsaspekte in der japanischen Malerei,“ [Materiality, Patronage and the Biography of Objects: Aspects of Canonization in Japanese Painting] in Kanon Kunstgeschichte. Einführung in Werke und Methoden[Canon in Art History. Introduction to Works and Methods], Bd. 2: Neuzeit / vol. 2: Early Modern Period,edited by Kristin Marek and Martin Schulz. München/Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2015: 36-58.

“Localizing the Hachiman engi / Hachiman engi no rôkarizêshon 八幡縁起のローカリゼーション,” (chapter in both English and Japanese), in Katachi saikô – hirakareta katari no tame ni 「かたち」再考——開かれた語りのために」 / Reconsidering “Form”: Towards a more open discussion, edited by the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo: National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, 2014, 221-253 (jp.) and 41-64 (engl.); additionally published as a commercial book under the same title, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2014: 221-253.